Product Description: When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a battlefront. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes and bombs heralded grueling nights of sleeplessness, fear and loss. But for Graham Greene and some of his contemporaries, this was a bizarrely euphoric time when London became the setting for intense love affairs and surreal beauty...read more

“Powerful and often startling…The Deserters offers a provokingly fresh angle on this most studied of conflicts.” --The Boston GlobeA groundbreaking history of ordinary soldiers struggling on the front lines, The Deserters offers a completely new perspective on the Second World War. Charles Glass—renowned journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation—delves deep into army archives, personal diaries, court-martial records, and self-published memoirs to produce this dramatic and heartbreaking portrait of men overlooked by their commanders and ignored by history.Surveying the 150,000 American and British soldiers known to have deserted in the European Theater, The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II tells the life stories of three soldiers who abandoned their posts in France, Italy, and Africa. Their deeds form the backbone of Glass’s arresting portrait of soldiers pushed to the breaking point, a sweeping reexamination of the conditions for ordinary soldiers.With the grace and pace of a novel, The Deserters moves beyond the false extremes of courage and cowardice to reveal the true experience of the frontline soldier. Glass shares the story of men like Private Alfred Whitehead, a Tennessee farm boy who earned Silver and Bronze Stars for bravery in Normandy—yet became a gangster in liberated Paris, robbing Allied supply depots along with ordinary citizens. Here also is the story of British men like Private John Bain, who deserted three times but never fled from combat—and who endured battles in North Africa and northern France before German machine guns cut his legs from under him. The heart of The Deserters resides with men like Private Steve Weiss, an idealistic teenage volunteer from Brooklyn who forced his father—a disillusioned First World War veteran—to sign his enlistment papers because he was not yet eighteen. On the Anzio beachhead and in the Ardennes forest, as an infantryman with the 36th Division and as an accidental partisan in the French Resistance, Weiss lost his illusions about the nobility of conflict and the infallibility of American commanders.Far from the bright picture found in propaganda and nostalgia, the Second World War was a grim and brutal affair, a long and lonely effort that has never been fully reported—to the detriment of those who served and the danger of those nurtured on false tales today. Revealing the true costs of conflict on those forced to fight, The Deserters is an elegant and unforgettable story of ordinary men desperately struggling in extraordinary times.

Product Description: Sergeant Steve Maharidge returned from World War II an angry man. For a long time, the only evidence that remained of his service in the Marines was a photograph of himself and a buddy that he tacked to the basement wall. When his son, Dale Maharidge, set out to discover what happened to the friend in the photograph, he found that wars do not end when the guns go quiet...read more

Product Description: This book offers a compelling account of how America's combat soldiers experienced Europe during World War II. It paints a vivid picture of the GIs' struggles with its natural surroundings, their confrontations with its soldiers, their encounters with its civilians, and their reactions to uncovering the holocaust...read more

Product Description: This study compares the policies and attitudes toward the health consequences of World War II in eleven European countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, East Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and West Germany...read more

Product Description: James Hinton uses diaries kept by nine 'ordinary' people in wartime Britain to re-evaluate the social history of the Second World War, and to reflect on the twentieth-century making of the modern self. These diaries were written by some of the unusually self-reflective and public-spirited people who agreed to write intimate journals about their daily activity for the social research organisation, Mass Observation...read more

Product Description: Military professionals and theorists have long understood the relevance of morale in war. Montgomery, the victor at El Alamein, said, following the battle, that 'the more fighting I see, the more I am convinced that the big thing in war is morale'...read more

Product Description: A groundbreaking English-language examination of the final period of Nazi rule in Germany’s eastern provinces at the end of the Second World War, this work outlines the wartime role of this region and assesses the impact of Nazi mobilization initiatives during the closing months of the conflict...read more

Product Description: In The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma, Emily Roxworthy contests the notion that the U.S. government’s internment policies during World War II had little impact on the postwar lives of most Japanese Americans. After the curtain was lowered on the war following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Americans behaved as if the “theatre of war” had ended and life could return to normal...read more

In an examination of how events from World War II became prominent in American cultural memory, the author of Primitive Passions discusses how Americans have lived under the power of a war complex since the end of World War II.

Product Description: Author Juraj Buzalka analyses the interplay between religion, politics and memory in the context of postsocialist transformations in south-east Poland. He shows that two Catholic churches play a crucial role in commemorations of the warfare and ethnic cleansings that took place here during and after the Second World War: while the Roman Catholic Church claims a privileged status for the Polish nation, the Greek Catholic Church does the same for the Ukrainian minority...read more

Product Description: For sixty years, different groups in Europe have put forth interpretations of World War II and their respective countries’ roles in it consistent with their own political and psychological needs. The conflict over the past has played out in diverse arenas, including film, memoirs, court cases, and textbooks...read more

Product Description: In 1834, Lord Melbourne spoke the words that epitomized the British government's attitude towards its own involvement in the arts: ""God help the minister that meddles with Art."" One hundred years later, however, with the onset of World War II, that attitude changed dramatically when ""cultural policy"" became a key element of the domestic front ...read more

Product Description: This book considers the connections between memory and violence in the wake of World War II. Covering the range of European experiences from East to West, Memory and World War II takes a long-term approach to the study of trauma at the local level...read more

Product Description: Award-winning journalist and author Tom Mathews offers a powerful and unique portrait of generational strife and changing styles of masculinity as seen through the stories of ten World War II veterans and their baby boomer sons - including Mathews and his father, a veteran of the fabled 10th Mountain Division...read more

Product Description: In A Place for Apology, author Shu Kishida examines America's foreign policy strategies with Japan. The author contemplates whether or not Japan is America's satellite nation, a question on the mind of many Japanese. Professor Kishida contends that the problematic pattern of American denial and repression of guilt led to an unsuccessful American occupation of Japan after World War II and the disastrous effect of the Tokyo War Tribunal on the Japanese psyche...read more

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Product Description: Book by Gottschalk, Louis A.

Product Description: This is a book about the horrors of war, how families survive wars and the ways in which wars affect the survivors.

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Product Description: A startling omission from the extensive literature on the Pacific events of World War II is an analysis of Allied psychological operations. Allison B. Gilmore makes a strong case for the importance of psychological warfare in this theater, countering the usual view of fanatical resistance by Japanese units...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The glow of 1945 persists as a kind of beacon for American society, symbolic of an era when good and evil were easily defined. This image is at the center of Philip D. Beidler's entertaining look at the way World War II reshaped American popular culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)